March 5, 2018

Subscribe

Nest Hello will work with Google Home to announce who’s actually at the door

by John_A

You’ll just have to teach it a tad.

In hindsight, this one should have been obvious. And maybe Nest spelled it out explicitly and I just missed it. But in any event, let’s codify it here.

Nest Hello — the upcoming video doorbell from the company best known for its thermostats and cameras — will work with Google Home (and Google Home Mini — really, with Google Assistant) to announce who’s at your door. That is, it’ll recognize who’s there thanks to Nest Aware’s “Familiar Faces” feature, and then spit out that info over a Google Home. Nest is throwing in a free Google Home Mini if you pre-order Nest Hello by March 14.

Hmmmm. Not sure if I just missed this before, or if they updated for it, but it was obvious, no? pic.twitter.com/iT46qLtA5m

— Phil Nickinson (@mdrndad) March 5, 2018

Familiar Faces is a thing by which Nest recognizes that there’s a face (erm, or not) and then asks you to give it a name. From then on when it recognizes that person (or chair) it’ll say “Hey, there’s Phil. Phil’s here. Hi, Phil.” Or something like that. The point is that it doesn’t just pluck that person’s identity off of the internet — you have to personalize things.

But this will solve one of my major headaches regarding connected doorbells. It’s great being able to see who’s coming, or who’s there. But there’s still just enough lag time between the doorbell seeing someone and my being able to respond to a notification and open and app and then visually figure out who it is.

This should cut a couple steps out of the process.

For a couple other things on my Nest Hello wish list, check out “How Nest Hello could out-doorbell Ring.”